A step up

OneRiot, a real-time search engine for web and video content, has launched a new Twitter search engine with a unique angle: Rather than focus on what people are saying, the search engine focuses on the web pages people are linking to.

But whenever the subject of real-time search and/or Twitter search comes up, inevitably the argument heads to “too much meaningless chatter to find anything of value”. It’s a generally fair argument. But OneRiot thinks it’s found a way to cut through the layers of noise.

How Does It Work?

One Riot crawls Twitter, looking for tweets with embedded links, then crawls and indexes the content being linked to. The OneRiot search algorithm includes spam checking and has checks for relevance, and a “hotness” factor for URLs that are being talked about a lot in recent tweets.

As you do a search, you can see the focus is on content — the URLs people are discussing and sharing on Twitter. But Twitter being a social site, OneRiot’s search results also include some social elements for anyone who wants to dip into the conversation. Each result includes a reference to how recently the link was shared on Twitter, how many tweets mention it, and who first posted it on Twitter.

It’s a unique approach to Twitter search that should prove particularly beneficial to the business community embracing social media advertising. In a short time testing the service, I found that it does bypass a lot of the chatter, and leads more quickly to relevant content. And there’s convenience too, in that OneRiot’s search expands shortened links, so you can see the actual content link.

An alpha version of their Twitter search engine is available now at twitter.oneriot.com.